Michael Cohen, who served as Donald Trump's goofus consigliere for more than a decade before it all came undone, testified on Wednesday before the House Oversight Committee about his exploits, lawful and otherwise, while in the president's employ. This development was equal parts baffling and upsetting for Republican committee members, who spent two years straining to shield the White House from meaningful oversight, only to watch as a stone-faced co-conspirator set their work on fire on live national television.

Democrats spent most of their allotted time asking Cohen about his written testimony. It detailed, among many other things, Trump's supposed disinterest in winning the 2016 race and his description of his candidacy as "the greatest infomercial in political history," as well as various demonstrations of casual racism and Cohen's Trump-ordered efforts to bar the release of the president's grades and SAT scores. "He once asked me if I could name a country run by a black person that wasn't a 'shithole,' " recalled Cohen. "This was when Barack Obama was president of the United States."

Republicans, meanwhile, spent their time angrily recounting Cohen's convictions for bank and wire fraud; his purported unfulfilled desire to be Trump's chief of staff; the possibility that he might make money off of a hypothetical book deal; and his admitted complicity in the very misconduct of which he now accuses Trump. In the contest for "most over-the-top performance transparently designed to elicit a fawning @realDonaldTrump tweet," Freedom Caucus wingnut Mark Meadows and noted abuse-tolerator Jim Jordan battled to an embarrassing draw. Jordan, the committee's ranking member, punctuated his opening statement with a truly insane rant about Peter Strzok and the "fake dossier" that Laura Ingraham will surely crib for her monologue tonight.

Reasonable people might find it fair to wonder if a person who literally pleaded guilty to perjuring himself before one legislative committee should be trusted to deliver truthful testimony to a different one a few months later. But if House Republicans set out to publicly undermine the credibility of a man associated with the president, highlighting all the lies he told to cover up the president's alleged criminality was a...strange strategy for doing so.

Because it relates to a distinct aspect of the federal investigations into Trumpworld, perhaps the event's most interesting revelation was Cohen's inclusion of the checks by which he was reimbursed for hush-money payments he made to Stormy Daniels. Some of those checks came from the Trump Organization, while others were written by Trump himself. In either case, these receipts complicate the efforts of Rudy Giuliani and company to assert that the president—whom prosecutors have already named as an unindicted co-conspirator in a felony—cannot himself be culpable for violations of campaign-finance law.

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Cohen also shed light on the extent of Trump's connections to the Kremlin while he was a candidate for president. He claimed, for example, that Trump asked frequently for updates on the proposed Trump Tower Moscow project, even as he publicly denied having any business interests in Russia. Cohen stated he was in the room when Donald Trump and Donald Trump Jr. discussed a mysterious "meeting" shortly before the infamous "If it's what you say I love it" summit. (The conversation piqued Cohen's attention, he says, because "Mr. Trump had frequently told me and others that his son Don Jr. had the worst judgment of anyone in the world.") And Cohen says he was present when Roger Stone phoned Trump to report that WikiLeaks would soon begin releasing illegally obtained Clinton e-mails in order to damage her campaign.

Lastly, he attempted to clear up lingering confusion over an explosive BuzzFeed News report that the president "directed" Cohen to lie to Congress about Trump Tower Moscow—a report the special counsel's office, in an unusual move, denied the next day. "Mr. Trump did not directly tell me to lie to Congress. That’s not how he operates," Cohen said, explaining the mob-like understanding. Since Trump was out there telling the same lies, and since Cohen says Trump's lawyers reviewed and altered his earlier testimony before he offered it to Congress, he didn't need an explicit order to understand what he was to do. When the boss informs the secretary his dry cleaning is ready, everyone understands that for what it is: an order to pick up the dry cleaning immediately, or else.

Whether any of this information is sufficient to support charges of, say, obstructing justice or suborning perjury is a political question for the legislative body to which the Constitution entrusts the power of impeachment. It is also doubtful that anything in Michael Cohen's testimony was new to Robert Mueller or any other relevant law enforcement officials. Today's event was, instead, a prime opportunity for the American people to hear about the depths of their president's corruption straight from a man responsible for facilitating it—and to see just how desperate Republicans are to keep it under wraps.

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